The goal of this instrument supplement application is to boost our productivity through the purchase of a DNA synthesis and purification system. Our goal in the original application is to study a novel antisense oligonucleotide platform in vitro and in vivo for potential therapeutic applications, which requires relatively large amounts of the nucleic acid material (on the order of hundreds of milligrams per study). However, our current setup only produces several milligrams (<10 mg) per synthesis. As such, our in vivo studies must be carefully designed to minimize the usage of materials, and even so, 2-3 months are needed to accumulate sufficient materials for a single study. The proposed DNA synthesizer/purification system will be able to shorten the synthesis to one week, thereby freeing students/postdocs from the labor-intensive work of sample preparation and allowing them to focus on studying the samples in biological systems. The requested funds will be used to purchase the DNA synthesizer (GE Oligopilot 10), while Northeastern University and the PI will contribute funds to purchase the accompanying purification system (GE AKTA Pure 150). The pair of instruments will be purchased, installed, and fully operational as soon as funding becomes available.
The proposal aims to acquire a DNA synthesizer and an accompanying purification system that will massively accelerate our research efforts to develop a novel nucleic acid-based therapeutic platform. Currently, materials synthesis accounts for a significant portion of the research time for trainees involved in the project, representing a major bottleneck. With the instrument acquisition, the synthesis time is expected to be reduced by up to 90%, allowing much more effort to be focused on understanding the materials structure-property relationship in vitro and in vivo.
| Li, Hui; Zhang, Bohan; Lu, Xueguang et al. (2018) Molecular spherical nucleic acids. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 115:4340-4344 |
